The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:
Operatives Jackson Reiners and Rachel McPhee.
Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
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"The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way."
- Marcus Aurelius
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Santi had stared at the rear axle on the ground where it had fallen for a few minutes before making up his mind.
"Fuck it," he said. "You can't have something new unless you tear down the old."
"It seems like frustration has made a philosopher out of a gonk," Sasha teased with a giggle.
"It is as they say," Santi spoke, pushing out his chest. "When frustration arrives at your doorstep, you can either let it in and sulk, or push it aside and get going."
"Who the fuck ever said that?" Judy asked with a frown that was holding back a laugh.
"Me," Santi said. "Just now."
"Well then, Mr. Inspirational Quotes," Sasha quipped. "What are you going to do now that your magnum opus has sheared itself apart?"
"Well, there is this one quote I know that goes 'To conquer frustration, one must remain intensely focused on the outcome, not obstacles," Santi said as he grabbed a ratchet. "Time to get this show on the road."
Santi's new plan was to strip, assess, and fabricate. So he began stripping (ayyyyoooo).
Sasha, though limited in her knowledge of cars, stepped up to help him, and Judy also got to work without further discussion, both of them taking positions on either side of the car while Santi raised the lift and got under the car. After a few minutes, the driver's side fender came off in pieces.
The fender separated from its mounting points the moment he applied force, and the corroded sheet metal tore away from the bolt head like wet paper. He discovered that the metal around the fastener had rusted into something that no longer qualified as metal in any sense. He managed to catch a part of the panel before it hit the ground, and part of it just crumbled off. He then set it on the workbench, and then another section of the lower edge crumbled off and scattered across the surface.
Since the Mustang had no hood, Santi moved onto the passenger fender and then the doors, which Judy helped lower to the ground carefully. Then the trunk lid. Each panel was removed with a care that was mostly unnecessary because they were too far gone to save regardless of how gently they handled it.
Santi cataloged each panel as it came off, using his Kiroshis to run composition analysis and structural assessment on each one of them, and finally filing the results in a running inventory file he overlaid on the corner of his vision in a grid of red and amber tags. Red for unsalvageable and amber for questionable. However, there was no green because nothing in it was in good condition.
By the time night had started to creep on Night City, the Boss 429 had been reduced to its frame. The body panels were stacked against the far wall in a pile that had been labeled as "scrap-fab feedstock," since that was the only future those panels had due to the fact that the oxidation had consumed too much of the original material to preserve it. However, the base iron was still iron, and the scrap-fab could break it down, purify it, and reforge it into usable stock. There was something about the idea of how the car would, in a sense, become part of its own replacement that made Santi's heart beat a little bit faster.
Sasha ended up staying the whole day, leaving once the clock hit ten after helping sweep the rust flakes and debris into a collection bin, and Judy left twenty minutes later, carrying a handful of bolts she'd salvaged from the Mustang's door hinges for her own project. Santi stayed on the ground floor for another hour, walking around the stripped unibody shell hanging on the now lowered lift, mapping the damage.
Once the clock went past midnight and Julia had returned, he decided it was time to take a shower and go to sleep as well. While he showered, he went to bed knowing exactly what he was going to do tomorrow morning.
Santi woke up the next day to a delivery for a tool he had ordered: a sandblaster. It was a refurbished Petrochem industrial unit that Santi had picked up from a surplus vendor in the net, and it was pretty easy to get going. He connected it to a compressor, ensured it held a pressure of ninety PSI, and that the hopper was full of garnet abrasive media.
He also had to throw on a full respirator, sealed coveralls, and a face shield because, apart from being loud, a sandblaster would leave you filthy as shit. He looked like one of those scientists in movies that are messing with shit they shouldn't be touching. And even after all of that preparation, the fine grit found its way into his collar, his sleeves, and, somehow, his hair. The compressor ran continuously while the nozzle stripped away decades of corrosion in a controlled, hissing spray that revealed the bare metal underneath one square inch at a time.
He worked from the front of the car backward, and the front end was where the good news lived.
He determined that the engine bay and the front frame rails were in "fair" condition. The metal was pitted, scarred, and thinned in places, but it was still metal. It was still continuous and capable of bearing a load, as long as it wasn't too much. The front subframe mounting points were compromised at the surface but intact once he went past that point, the over-engineering of 1970 Dearborn manufacturing being the only reason any part of the original structure had survived a century of the world's new environment.
However, with every foot from the firewall back, the story seemed to deteriorate faster and faster.
Santi mapped the cabin floor inch by inch as the sandblaster stripped away the oxidation. With the help of a program he was running that fed the feed from his Kiroshis to one of the terminals on the ground floor, he was building a three-dimensional damage model that would then be sent back to him as a rendered model in the bottom left corner of his eyes as a heat map of structural integrity, starting off with a green that was rapidly fading to amber and then fading to red.
According to the program, the driver's footwell was solid along with the center tunnel. However, the outer floor sections, rocker panels, and seat mounting points were a lattice of rust that would have failed the moment anyone sat in the car. And as if that wasn't enough, by the time he reached the B-pillars, the heat map had gone full red and stayed there. The rear half of the cabin, which included the rear wheel arches, the trunk floor, the shock towers, and everything that connected them to the car's longitudinal structure, was beyond salvage. He pressed a screwdriver against the rear wheel arch, and it went through the metal like a hot knife through butter, leaving a hole rimmed with flaking oxide.
By the time Sasha arrived that afternoon with synthi-caf and a portable projector tucked under her arm, Santi had completed a full assessment and was sitting on an overturned crate in front of the stripped, sandblasted shell of the Mustang with his respirator hanging around his neck and rust dust in his hair while running the numbers.
"I brought a projector," Sasha said, setting the synthi-caf down on the workbench and looking around for a suitable wall. "Figured if we're going to be in here for a while, we might as well have some fun."
"You can use that wall," Santi said, pointing a finger at the northern wall without looking up. "It has the smoothest surface."
Sasha nodded and set it up while he worked. By the time the first film was casting flickering color across the concrete, Santi had pulled a pair of secondhand studio monitors out of the storage closet on the second floor and Sasha had wired them into a battered amp she'd brought in her bag, and the ground floor had transformed in the span of twenty minutes.
Music filled the space between the films, a rotating selection that ranged from old Chippin' In covers to Japanese city-pop to aggressive electronic music that netrunners seemed to gravitate toward.
As the music blasted, Santi pulled up the frame schematics on the fabrication terminal and began marking cut lines while the projector threw a movie from a long time ago, in galaxy far, far away, across the wall behind him. Sasha sat cross-legged on the workbench with a tablet in her hands, reading something of her own while the music ran.
The Widowmaker's new frame was going to be a fabricated space-frame architecture made up of 4130 chromoly tubing and AR550 plate that would form the structural skeleton that the armor and the body panels would be attached to. It would be stronger than the original unibody by an order of magnitude.
Santi had also decided to cut the salvageable sections of the original frame into segments and layer them into the interior structure of the new space frame. The original metal would be laminated into the frame's interior as a core layer, sandwiched between the new structural tubing and the armor plate, where it would work to add mass, dampening, and continuity.
Essentially, the new Widowmaker would have the old Boss 429 inside it, using the Dearborn steel like a ninety-nine-year-old ghost riding inside of the machine.
Sure, it was not the most efficient engineering decision he could have made, and a purist would have argued that laminating old, compromised metal into a new frame added weight without proportional strength, and though they would have been correct, Santi had already made up his mind that the car was going to carry its own history in its frame. A half-percent efficiency penalty was a price he was willing to pay for something that efficiency couldn't buy.
There was also another major change he was going to do. Since a large portion of the cabin managed to survive the trials and tribulations that came with the passage of time... he was going to split it down the middle.
The decision to do so hadn't been a spur-of-the-moment type of thing, but something Santi had long since decided on. The original 1970 Boss 429 had a front track width of 59.3 inches and a rear track of 58.5 inches, a measurement that was narrow by any standard, and way too narrow to properly convert 4,500 horsepower to the ground without turning all of it into wheelspin. In Santi's new design, the new front track would be 72 inches while the rear would be 75 inches.
It would be wider at the back than the front, creating a deliberate asymmetry that shifted the car's dynamic balance rearward under power and gave it the specific handling characteristics he was designing for.
The final body would be wider still, coming in at around 82 inches across the front widebody fenders and 85 inches across the rears, its aggressive flares adding another 10 inches of visual presence on each side beyond the track width itself. The Widowmaker was intentionally designed to be aggressive and one of a kind, sporting 21-inch wheels, 355/30 up front and 405/30 at the rear. The tires would be mounted on forged aluminum wheels that Santi would machine on the CNC from his aluminum stock.
The wider rear track also increased the rear axle's resistance to lateral load transfer, and under cornering, the rear tires would hold grip longer before breaking loose. But the compound-boosted V8 would produce enough torque to override that grip on demand, and the wide track would make the breakaway progressive and controllable.
If the program Santi had been using to mock this all up wasn't bullshitting him, the car would drift with grace, sliding sideways at speed and coming back into line without drama. And at a projected top speed of two hundred and eighty-seven miles an hour in a straight line, the wide track would plant the car to the road, resisting the aerodynamic forces that made narrower cars quite literally shake at half that speed.
If he really wanted to integrate the old into the new, creating his own monster, becoming Frankenstein, then splitting the original cabin was the price of admission. Santi marked the centerline, then followed it with the plasma cutter's guide beam while Sasha turned a page on her tablet and the music shifted to Frank Sinatra's "My Way."
Once he mock-followed it a few times, he ignited the plasma cutter, sending blue-white arcs that threw hard shadows across the floor, and began cutting.
The hissing roar of ionized gas consuming metal at four thousand degrees accompanied Frank Sinatra's voice, the sparks cascading from the cut line in a waterfall of orange and white as Frank's voice rose.
He cut the centerline first, running the torch along the guide beam with a steady and controlled feed rate he hadn't really practiced, but had rewatched a BD more than enough times to have it be second nature. He then made lateral cuts, separating the salvageable front end from the junk rear, each cut following the marks he had laid out on the schematic and projected onto the car itself through his Kiroshis. (Only visible to him)
Once Santi got tired of cutting, he dropped onto the couch with Sasha and watched a new movie called "The Matrix," which, although it was well over half a century old, reminded him of Night City's reality. Sasha and Santi spent the rest of the day just watching movies and chatting, and by the time they finished, it was 1 am.
Santi offered Sasha to stay over in the spare room they had, and Julia, who had stepped out of her room to grab some water, ended up raising an eyebrow at him when she saw Sasha. However, she didn't say anything about it and told Sasha she was more than welcome to stay, since it was too late to go home and, with the war drawing ever closer, the city had only gotten more dangerous at night.
Sasha agreed and became the first person since Alejandro to sleep under the same roof as the mother-son duo.
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They say stones are the root of all evil... no wonder I love them so much!
The infamous P@treon exists for those of you who want to read ahead.
patreon .com/Crimson_Reapr (Don't be a gonk, remove the space)
They get various long-form chapters weekly.